


Come Undone

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-23
Updated: 2011-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-15 00:36:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/155245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose explains the plan to her familiar and passes down the joy of knitting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Undone

Casey stands on the edge of the lava flow with her toes curled in toward herself and her knees scraped and burnt. Her robes are charred at the very edges and ripped from the few times she'd tripped and fallen in battle. She's getting better at fighting. She hasn't yet grasped the depth of her master's magicks but she's faster and sharper and quicker on her feet than she ever had to be in her life before. She thinks she's becoming a good apprentice. Perhaps by the time she reaches home again, she'll be strong enough to pass her knowledge down.

She's been through two worlds already and in the quiet times between imp battles she thinks to herself about the stories she will tell when she gets back home. She thinks of her mother and her town and she misses them, yes, but this adventure is more than any salamander had ever dreamed before.

It's something beyond Casey herself. It is something that will be remembered into the ages.

But the heat in this strange lava world is oppressive. It makes her skin dry and taut and close to cracking. She pants in the dry heat, remembering the smooth oil streams of her home world and the beautiful shining sunsets on the world where she had met her master.

Those had been wonderful worlds.

This one is hot and terrible, and in her moments of weakness Casey wishes the tugs at her master's robes would be answered with more than, "We cannot proceed yet. There are a multitude of things that must be completed on this plane."

Behind Casey, her master is muttering to herself. Her voice is a slow, constant murmur, the words nothing that Casey can understand but the air feels charged with knowledge. She can feel the power in those words. It is inspiring.

Times like these, when the burns on her soft skin ache and her eyes run constantly in the dry heat, Casey clings to that inspiration. She needs something to keep going, and it's been a long while since her master offered the kind teaching words she used to. Casey misses that. She misses her father too, the human who had come out of nowhere to embrace her and her mother, to press the bunny into her moist hands and call her his daughter. She had never had a father before, nor a name. Casey sometimes wonders where he'd gone, but she also knows he has greatness in his blood and a quest to complete.

He brought her to the Seer, and now Casey and her master are on a quest of their own. Now she is more than a simple salamander girl. She has two names; the true name her father had given her, and the magical name given to her by her master.

"Bubbles," her teacher calls suddenly, the quiet spell falling from her lips and splattering into nothing against the hot gears beneath their feet. "Bring me my wands."

Casey turns in that calm, smooth motion her master had taught her, slipping her fingertips into one wide sleeve and pulling the wands from the pocket set within. She steps over the warm metal and stands at her master's knee, sliding the needles into the Seer's outstretched palm.

"Thank you," she says softly, and Casey is a bit surprised to see her master look up at her, to set her crystal ball aside and actually meet her apprentice's gaze. A smile ghosts over her lips and then her eyes slide down to Casey's hands, her feet and the exposed tip of her tail. "You look tired. How are you holding up, my viceroy?"

Casey runs a dry tongue over her lips, her mouth too parched to form the bubbles she needs to speak. Instead she lets her eyelids flutter closed, lets her posture sag back into the childlike slump that broadcasts her young age so well. Her hands and feet hurt and she is very tired.

A cool hand presses against the side of her face and she opens her eyes again, watching as her master sets down her wands and reaches out the freed hand to take the salamander's tiny paws into her own. She looks over the burns and the scrapes and then her lips press into a thin line.

"I've been distracted," she says. "It's important that you rest. This world isn't the most hospitable habitat for you, and I apologize that I've forgotten." She searches through her inventory slowly, eventually extracting one of the towels she'd dampened before they had come to this fiery land. The fabric drips slightly and sends up little curls of steam as the water falls onto the warm gears and vaporizes in the dry, hot air.

Casey takes it, pushing back the hood of her robes and wrapping the wet towel around her head. The liquid seeps slowly out of it, and as it runs into her dry eyes she notices that it still holds some of the beautiful colors that had been everywhere in the light world.

Her master watches, her hands folded in her lap patiently, and Casey rubs the water into her skin and wipes the ash away. The moisture revives her. After a quiet moment she hangs it back on her head, squinting at the red distance and watching the pinks and yellows swirl through her vision.

"Do you understand what we're doing here, Bubbles?"

They're defeating the game. They're ending it. Casey doesn't know what that means, only that her master has been saying it over and over almost as a sort of mantra.

A ball of deep purple yarn falls into the Seer's hands, cradled there in one cupped palm as she settles her inventory away again. She takes the ball and holds it up, dipping three fingers into the center and nimbly pulling out the end of the string. Then she takes one wand—a needle—and Casey watches as she slowly casts stitches onto it; purple spaced evenly amongst the swirls of black-and-white.

"When I dream, I hear whispers from beyond," she says quietly, and it's the calm teaching voice that she hasn't used in a while. Casey listens, eager to continue her training. "I hear beings in my dreams that are ancient and far beyond wise."

She falls silent for a while, easing the second needle against the first. She knits, carefully but with a speed that Casey finds entrancing. The needles click and clack, the yarn flowing through her hands, and she turns her work again and again, the length of fabric steadily growing.

"These beings know things about the game. They are more knowledgeable than I could ever hope to be, and they've watched this game play out countless times before. They know the inner workings and the mechanics behind what it does. On occasion they give me hints as to how to break it. They've grown weary of watching it play. They want it destroyed."

A pause.

"Unraveled, so to speak."

Casey listens and she watches the piece of cloth grow. It's thin, only as wide across as her master's palm, but already it's nearly three times as long.

"Kanaya hinted to me that a certain amphibian was of great importance in her session. I laughed once I finally realized it. I think Strider would enjoy the irony if he understood."

Casey blinks because she herself doesn't understand. She looks up and her master is watching her now, the needles suddenly still in her hands. She sets one aside, then the other, pulling it slowly out of the stitches. The loops sag there, threatening to slip through each other and fall from fabric back into yarn.

"There is a colloquial term in knitting for when you are required to unravel something before you've finished," she says, still holding Casey's eye. "Can you guess what it is?"

Casey shakes her head.

Her master smiles and she takes the fabric in one hand, the loose strand of yarn in the other, and she _yanks._ The loops pop and snag and pop again, the knitting unraveling in a ragged _ribbit-ribbit-ribbit_ of yarn on yarn.

"It's known as frogging."

Her Master's smile widens into cleverness and she looks up into the burning black smog of the lava world's atmosphere.

"We'll frog this game," she says, the smile on her face and her eyes dancing. "We'll tear it back to its component pieces and then we'll build as we wish."

Casey watches her master and the ruined piece of cloth in her lap. She doesn't fully understand but a shiver runs up her spine anyway.

Destruction? Their quest is to destroy?

She's not sure how she feels about that. She stands there silently for a moment, still and thinking, and then she bends and lifts the swatch of purple from her master's lap. She holds it and weaves one of her own wands into the open loops. It's still ruined but at least it can't unravel any farther.

Casey holds it out to her master, and she's not sure how to tell her that she understands that their quest is to destroy. That she can grasp. But she refuses to let her master unravel along with everything else.

The Seer is still smiling, watching Casey idly, and her expression warms at the gesture. She sets a hand against the wand and pushes it back toward Casey's chest. "Keep it. Practice. You can make things with us, too."

She pats Casey's head fondly, and in that moment Casey knows her master understands.


End file.
